A British data watchdog has raised questions about whether it was appropriate for a healthcare trust to share data on 1.6 million patients with DeepMind Health, an AI company owned by Google. The trust shared the data in connection with the test phase of Streams, an app designed to diagnose acute kidney injuries. However, the sharing reportedly was performed without an appropriate legal basis.

The WannaCry ransom attack that quickly circled the globe last week is not yet fully contained. So far, it has impacted more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries. However, one of the remarkable things about it is that only a trifling $100,000 in ransom, give or take, apparently has been paid. That represents a surprisingly low response from an attack generally considered the biggest ever.

Competition in telecom price and service packages has been getting a lot of attention lately. However, network providers also have been pursuing other opportunities that consumers might miss if they're exposed only to traditional advertising. AT&T's cooperation with the U.S. government in developing a national emergency responder network is a case in point.

Microsoft this weekend unleashed its wrath on the National Security Agency, alleging it was responsible for the ransomware attack that began last week and has spread to thousands of corporate, government and individual computer systems around the world. Microsoft Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith launched a blistering attack on the NSA and governments worldwide.

A technician hurriedly slings his backpack over his shoulders, straps on his M9 pistol, and bolts out of the transport with his squad of commandos in a hail of gunfire. As soon as his team reaches the compound, he whips out a laptop and starts deploying a rootkit to the target server, bullets whizzing overhead all the while. Army Cyber Institute's recruits are training to do just that.

Comedian John Oliver, incensed over proposed changes to unravel Net neutrality protections for consumers, unleashed a torrent of criticism against the FCC and urged viewers to register their protest online. The response led to a digital meltdown on the agency's site Sunday night. Oliver targeted a proposal that would loosen Net neutrality regulations.

United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz on Tuesday apologized to the United States Congress for his company causing a passenger to be dragged off a UA flight last month. United failed its customers and failed as a company in that incident, and this has to be a turning point for the airline, Munoz told the U.S. House of Representatives Transportation Committee at a hearing into airline industry practices.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a long-anticipated executive order that addresses a campaign promise to begin shifting the country toward the "Buy American, Hire American" strategy that appealed to much of the industrial working class population in the Rust Belt states. The order calls on the U.S. government to shift purchasing toward domestically produced goods.

Federal agencies seeking to deal with huge amounts of information have begun embracing the software-defined data center, a technology tool that has come into vogue for managing and storing data. The SDDC is an offshoot of IT virtualization that uses a software-defined architecture. Agencies have been striving to save money and improve data storage and management in response to government mandates.

An alleged spam kingpin with possible ties to election meddling in the U.S. was arrested in Spain last week under a U.S. international warrant. Pyotr Levashov had been vacationing in Barcelona with his family. Levashov was arrested for interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, the Russian news outlet RT reported, but the DoJ said the arrest was not connected to national security.

The Department of Labor has found "systemic compensation disparities" between Google's female employees and their male counterparts, regional director Janette Wipper said at a hearing in San Francisco. The hearing was in connection with the department's lawsuit over Google's failure to hand over detailed compensation data about employees at its Mountain View, California, headquarters.

Screaming sirens serenaded Dallas residents in the early morning hours Saturday after a cyberattack set off the city's emergency warning system. All of the city's 156 sirens reportedly were set off more than a dozen times. Officials have not yet identified the perpetrator of the attack, but it likely was someone outside the Dallas area, said Office of Emergency Management Director Rocky Vaz.

Protecting the data in electronic health records did not start with the advent of HIPAA, as many people think. Protecting health records has been a critical requirement in the healthcare space since the computers became a fixture in hospitals. However, HIPAA added public reports of fines issued for covered entities' failure to properly protect data contained within EHRs.

UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd on Sunday called for greater government access to encrypted content on mobile apps. Apps with end-to-end encryption, like Facebook's WhatsApp, should not be allowed to conceal terrorists' communications from law enforcement, Rudd said in a television interview. "There should be no place for terrorists to hide," she said.

Privacy advocates and consumer groups are fighting back against the U.S. Senate's Thursday vote to undo privacy restrictions on Internet service providers. In a 50-48 party line vote, the Senate approved the Congressional Review Act, S.J. Res. 34. If the House of Representatives gives it the green light, it then will go to the president to be signed into law.

When the Department of Labor issued its fiduciary rule last year, it set financial advisers, insurers and agents into a mad scramble to meet an implementation deadline. The rule elevates all financial professionals who work with retirement plans or provide retirement planning advice to the level of a fiduciary, or someone bound legally and ethically to meet the standards of that status.

WikiLeaks has released more Vault 7 documentation online, including details about several CIA projects to infect Apple's Mac computer firmware and operating system. The site unloaded its first batch of stolen Vault 7 data earlier this month. The CIA's Embedded Development Branch developed malware that could persist even if the targeted computer were reformatted and its OS were reinstalled.

The new president is making almost the identical mistake President Obama made during his first two years. Trump has picked a major entitlement to hang his hat on -- the same major entitlement, healthcare -- and shortly will discover what most CIOs know: You don't mess with anything that touches everybody. The likely outcome will be that like Obama, Trump will lose the house in the next election.

The Justice Department has announced charges against four individuals, including two officers of Russia's FSB, for carrying out a massive cyberbreach that affected about 500 million Yahoo account holders. A federal grand jury in Northern California charged the defendants -- the FSB officials and two Russian cybercriminals -- with using stolen data to gain illegal access to numerous accounts.

Private and public sector organizations share a common goal in hosting Internet websites: making sure that connections with customers and citizens are secure. However, complete security is not yet universal in either sector. Google and Mozilla, for example, are among many entities promoting Internet security via the adoption of HTTPS versus the basic and less secure HTTP technology.

We saw yet another government breach last week, and more secrets went out to WikiLeaks. I'm of a mixed mind on this one, because the CIA tools disclosed likely were emulated by others, and WikiLeaks is helping consumer technology companies ensure they no longer work. I don't know about you, but I really don't want any organization spying on me -- not even my own government.

Following WikiLeaks' publication earlier this week of classified documents stolen from the CIA, major technology companies, including Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and Cisco, have been scrambling to assess the risks posed to their customers by the revelations. The so-called "Vault 7" leak includes information about methods and tools the CIA crafted to hack into products produced by those companies.

Already under the microscope for claims of sexual harassment and questionable labor practices, Uber this week said it would ban the use of a controversial technology to block regulatory authorities from monitoring its operations. The company's "greyballing" technology is designed to hide the standard city app view in specific cases -- for example, from former riders blocked for being abusive.

WikiLeaks on Tuesday dumped thousands of classified documents onto the Internet, exposing hacking programs used by the CIA. The torrent of data is just the first in a series of dumps WikLeaks is calling "Vault 7." This first installment includes 8,761 documents and files stolen from an isolated high-security network within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.

Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, last week issued a call for activation of the FM chips in smartphones. The vast majority of smartphones sold in the U.S. have FM chips, but they're activated in only about 44 percent of the top brands, Pai said. Although that's nearly twice the 25 percent figure of two years ago, it's not good enough, he suggested.

A major federal acquisition opportunity with a potential contract value of $50 billion for IT vendors is back on track. The GSA recently resumed processing vendor applications after a legal challenge to the contract was resolved in its favor. As a result, the GSA this fall will reveal the names of approximately 60 vendors who will be eligible to participate in the Alliant 2 IT contract vehicle.

The Financial Protection Bureau has come under increasing fire from Republican lawmakers who now have the Trump administration to back their efforts. Long-time critic Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R.-Texas, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, compared the bureau to a tyranny in a recent interview. Hensarling reportedly is preparing legislation to enact CFPB reforms.

President Trump offers a good emulation for a future artificial intelligence system, suggests a column I read earlier this month, and his presidency may be an early warning of what could happen if we should fail to think through its training and information sources. Cathy O'Neil, the author of the piece, compares artificial intelligence to human intelligence that is mostly id.

Microsoft has called on governments around the world to create a "digital Geneva Convention" as a way to normalize international cybersecurity rules and protect civilian use of the Internet.
President Brad Smith, who is also Microsoft's chief legal officer, addressed the issue at the annual RSA conference held earlier this week, saying that governments need to establish international rules.